Eric Hoffer Quotes

"No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments. We need people to bear witness against our inner judge, who keeps book on our shortcomings and transgressions. We need people to convince us that we are not as bad as we think we are."

"The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together."

"It sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents."

"Every intense desire is perhaps a desire to be different from what we are."

"To grow old is to grow common. Old age equalizes -- we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world."

"You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you."

"The passion to get ahead is sometimes born of the fear lest we be left behind"

"The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself."

"The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature. People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility."

"The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival."

"It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words"

"Friendship Never explain -- your friends do not need it, and your enemies will not believe it anyway. A real friend never gets in your way, unless you happen to be on the way down. A friend is someone you can do nothing with and enjoy it. However much we guard ourselves against it, we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us. It is not so much the example of others we imitate, as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words."

"We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about."

"Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know."

"Naivete in grownups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity."

"It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which we are influenced by those we influence."

"Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience."

"It is part of the formidableness of a genuine mass movement that the self-sacrifice it promotes includes also a sacrifice of some of the moral sense which cramps and restrains our nature."

"Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible"

"We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves."